Every so often I take a trip up to Red Hat’s office in Westford so I can sit down face to face with people to make sure we’re doing all we can to enable our community to do awesome things. These trips are always jam-packed with meetings and so I can’t be online as much as usual — so if you see “afk” next to my name on IRC, or wonder why my email responses are a little sluggish, you’ll know why! But a trip to Westford also offers a lot of chances to collaborate with people with whom I don’t get to share space very often. There’s something about interaction in person that is just irreplaceable.
Today, for example, I sat down with Luke Macken and John (J5) Palmieri to talk about our plans for instructional materials and presentations to help anyone write applications for the Moksha framework and our Fedora Community site. We are planning to make this one of the tentpoles (I dig that Tinseltown lingo) for the FUDCon in North America later this year. The goal would be to offer a couple of technical sessions at FUDCon that will teach anyone with just basic Python skills to write a simple application using Moksha and Fedora Community. And we would like to follow that up with a Fedora Activity Day offering for Fedora Community development, so a small team of people who want to expand into targeted goals for specific Fedora Community applications could get together at some point after FUDCon to hack their way to fabulous new collaborative capabilities for everyone. In a sense, the FUDCon sessions would be sort of a “farm team” for people to identify themselves as interested and incented to create awesome new functions that could potentially benefit the whole Fedora community.
Speaking of which, more details on FUDCon are coming soon, we’re just finalizing some of the site details. At this point, the location looks to be pretty clear. Our Fedora community friends in the great city of Toronto have secured space and some logistical support for this year’s big event that brings together users and developers from around North America. I’m very excited by the prospect of holding a North American FUDCon hosted by our neighbors to the north. Make sure you get your passports in order now.
As many people know, FUDCon is designed to be a gift back from Red Hat to the community, where we can make or renew acquaintances and common bonds of purpose, spreading freedom and friendship in a gathering where users, developers, and all kinds of contributors can interact and learn from one another. Just like a trip back to one’s home office makes it possible to collaborate in a high-bandwidth, content-rich fashion, FUDCon lets any attending contributors have access to an energetic cross-section of our diverse community to hear and talk about what matters to them. It’s a great opportunity to get involved, stay involved, and get other people excited about all the amazing things happening in our community.
In other news, J5 agreed to help out the Zikula cross-team initiative by looking over some of the issues with some licensing incompatibilities. Our hope is to get those resolved this week, so that we can get a full-featured test system underway. That will allow the various team representatives to start getting familiar with the system so we can progress to trying out some workflow and content provision. This work is pretty demanding and it’s been a pretty difficult slog up to this point, but the light is at the end of the tunnel. I’m very enthusiastic about having better ways to put news, marketing materials, and documentation in front of all our millions of users, and Zikula is going to be a big part of that plan.
My brain is telling me that it’s time to shut down for the evening. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write more tomorrow. Until then, be excellent to each other and viva Fedora!